Microprogramming may be broadly viewed as a technique for designing and implementing the control function of a digital computer system as sequences of control signals that are organized on a word basis and stored in a fixed or dynamically changeable control memory. Detailed examples of some known approaches to the design of microprogrammed digital computers can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 3,886,523, Ferguson et. al., issued May 27, 1975, U.S. Pat. No. 4,155,120, Keefer and Kim, issued May 15, 1979, U.S. Pat. No. 4,181,935, Feeser and Gerhold, issued Jan. 1, 1980 and U.S. Pat. No. 4,038,643, Kim, issued July 26, 1977; in the book by S. S. Husson, "Microprogramming; Principles and Practices", Prentice-Hall, Inc. (1970); in the book "Foundations of Microprogramming", Argrausala, et al., Academic Press, Inc., 1976; in the article "Microprogramming-Another Look at Internal Computer Control", M. J. Flynn, I.E.E.E. Proc., Vol. 63, No. 11, Nov. 1975, pp. 1554-1567; and in the article "Microprogramming: a Tutorial and Survey of Recent Developments" , I.E.E.E.E. Transaction on Computers, Vol. C-29, No. 1, Jan. 1980.
In recent years the concept of microprogramming has been extended for use in conjuction with pipelined architectures as described, for example, in the article "The Microprogramming of Pipelined Processors, P. M. Kogge, 4th Annual Symposium on Computer Architecture", Mar. 1977, pp. 63-69; and also in the article "A Pipeline Architecture Oriented Towards Efficient Multitasking", F. Romani, Euromicro, Oct. 1976, Vol. 2, No. 4, North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam.
The contents and teachings of the above references are to be regarded as incorporated herein.